And so, finally, to Cracked. The great thing about Cracked is that there are actually a lot of different reasons why its Google Trends graph looks like this:
There's a lot to unpack here. Let's get to work.
If you're not familiar, the pivot to video was something that came about in around 2015 where companies realised that video advertising was harder to ignore than textual advertising, and therefore made all their content video. This is why every site you go to, from BuzzFeed to the NYT, has those fucking dead autoplaying videos when you're just trying to read things. The official line on this is that "you digital natives just prefer consuming content this way," but I've never met anyone that likes them. Anyway, it turns out that the pivot to video was bollocks because 1) NO ONE LIKES THESE, and 2) it was all based on facebook lying, which I know seems ridiculous but is sadly true. Companies who'd fired their entire editorial staff in the name of producing more audiovisual content had to then fire their entire AV division, or at least admit it wasn't doing what was expected financially.
So Cracked lost money because of the pivot to video and that's why they fired their video team and that's why the website is dead now, right? No. Michael Swaim, former regular contributor and absolute legend, lays down the law in a YouTube comment on a video lamenting the loss of Cracked.
The OVERWHELMINGLY PRIMARY factor in the layoffs and decision to run Cracked as a "ghost ship" while it winds down was made by Scripps. ...they intentionally purchased a company on its down-slope so that they wouldn't be sued for wrongful terminations when they laid everyone off and took the huge financial loss. Why would a giant media company want to buy into a financial loss? Because, it is currently legal in the US to purchase a company, liquidate it at a loss, lay everyone off, credit the loss against the earnings of your hundred other media companies come tax season, and then pocket the money made by running a ghost ship company with no employees and presumably use it to counter other losses or pad the pockets of your board or investors. That's what happened. They didn't care about comedy, or content, or our politics, they're just a dying newspaper conglomerate who used us a loophole to cushion their own quarterly losses. Thought you'd want to know! People from without can cite other factors about why we were on the down-slope in the first place, and I'm not here to defend or deny any of those, but that was the direct reason for the layoffs and current state of the site. Scripps didn't bite off more than they can chew; they decided to liquidate us.
Again, I'm too stupid to fully understand what's going on or why it worked, but this strategy reminds me of how I had the Great Financial Crisis of ought-8 explained to me. Essentially, banks across the world gave mortgages to people who could 100% not pay them back, grouped these mortgages into delicious packages that were doomed to implode, and then went to finance insurers like AIG and said "oi i bet u this package will implode lol pls insure me against that" and then pocketed the insurance money when the mortgages went unpaid. Scripps were running a slightly different game, though; they stripped Cracked for parts, added the losses to their accounts at the end of the year so they'd be taxed less, and then pocketed the cash. They're not the inept digital immigrants that posts like this would have you believe, they clearly knew what they were doing. Like I've said before, companies aren't stupid - anything I can work out they can definitely work out. "But you just said companies ARE dum-" I say a lot of things, honey, don't deep it. Nuance and compassion are important, and I love them, but they're not entertaining or fun, so when I post, sometimes I will go all in on shit I don't necessarily 100% believe and be a lot meaner than I otherwise would be. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, my shitposts are large and meandering, they contain multitudes."
Nothing good lasts forever, right? Buddha's been trying to tell us that for ages. The best we can hope for is a brief moment where the stars align just right and a murderer's row of talent happens to coalesce somewhere. You know the kinds of stories. The Beatles before they made that ghastly Sgt. Pepper album, the Leicester City team that accidentally won the league, and so on. There are countless examples of groups coming together to do amazing work, and crucially, falling apart afterwards for whatever reason. John gets super into acid and Yoko, Kanté gets bought by Chelsea, and for our purposes, Soren Bowie gets poached by American Dad!.
Obviously the talent levels aren't quite the same (for the record it's Kanté > Soren >>> John "Woman Is The Nigger Of The World, Think About It" Lennon) but when Cracked was at its best it was home to a lot of very funny people. Soren, Dan O'Brien, Seanbaby, Michael Swaim, etc etc. were all frequent contributors to the site, whether through video or written content, and for a while there, they were incredibly popular - Wikipedia suggests that in 2010 Cracked drew over a billion pageviews.
Okay can we talk about this John Lennon clip for a second? Only someone as retarded as he could possibly think it was a good idea. First of all, I refuse to take lectures on the position of women in society from someone who beat his first wife, and then, AFTER THIS SONG, I.E. AFTER HIS "CHANGE OF HEART," left his wife to get fucked up with Harry Nilsson for a couple of years. Secondly, I'm not offended by him saying the n-word, I'm just confused that his line of argument was to attack people for being "white males" that didn't understand the good he was doing. You don't convert people by attacking their identities, it just entrenches them harder. This time last year a girl told me I was too smart to spend my time watching football, playing guitar and drinking, and so I doubled down on those things so hard I got a third this year. It simply doesn't work, it's a narcissistic injury that makes your brain want to maintain the status quo even more than usual. Also note the way he fucking bombs out, like he was expecting gasps, or even begrudging applause, "You've figured me out, o wonderful John!", but instead everyone is thoroughly bored. "Will you menaces to society just go and play your number?" deadpans the host, encapsulating what we're all thinking. John Lennon was the 1970s equivalent of "we live in a society"-posting and anyone who rates him as anything other than a good songwriter and occasional bellend is not to be trusted. Anyway.
"So you WERE saying once those writers left Cracked stopped being good?" I thought so, but it turns out the exodus isn't the catalyst either. Writers like Adam Tod Brown only left in 2016, Soren and Michael in 2017, and Seanbaby and David Wong are still there. We're clearly not dealing with a Leicester City here, that decline kicks off in 2012 and they didn't lose anyone until much later on. So what's going on here?
Revisiting the articles there are some good ones - 4 Things I Learned from the Worst Online Dating Profile Ever, by Alli Reed is one, and Exploring The Mysteries of the Mind With The Sims 3 by Seanbaby is still one of the funniest things I've ever read, as dumb as it is. Of course, those are the articles I could remember - the vast majority of things will have been run-of-the-mill Buzzfeed-esque content, and as much as I wish I could say the site now is noticeably worse because Swaim and the gang aren't still there, it's not that bad really. There are still some names I recognise (Luis Prada and Ian Fortey for example) and the content never really changed. It just feels like Cracked's moment passed, culturally more than content-wise. I don't think my age is necessarily the problem.
The thing about Cracked was it wasn't 100% humour. There was an occasional columnist called Robert Evans who would write up the personal experiences of people from all walks of life, often to suprisingly poignant effect, especially because we were expecting humour and got hit with something altogether more serious (with the odd joke injected in, of course). Columnist John Cheese wrote more and more about his hardscrabble, lower-class upbringing as time progressed. You can't read those articles though, cause it turns out he was a sex pest, as FUCKING per. De facto site leader David Wong (Jason Pargin) took a different tack - he was more of a self-help kinda harsh-truths writer, with the requisite amounts of circa 2012-internet-humour to sugar the pill. Funnily enough, he's the reason I know who the Last Psychiatrist is, since Wong mentioned him in this incredibly popular post that he updates a bit every year, and therefore Cracked is directly responsible for this clusterfuck of a blog. This is why I feel the need to eulogise the place, as well as its interesting place in internet history.
Speaking of, the development I want to point out is their drift away from bantz into radical liberal politics. You know, the kind of tumblr bluehair stuff that it's not even fun to roast anymore but I do it anyway. Robert Evans' articles contributed, because it made Cracked feel like it was an important journalistic website rather than the place you go when you want to read about the Top Ten Ways Iron Man 3 Makes NO Sense while you have a shit. John Cheese did the same, by establishing the site as pro-poors, rather than apolitical. "You can like poor people and still not necessarily be political!" No, honey, you can't, right-wing thought is predicated on hierarchy and the PRESERVATION of that hierarchy especially, if you start fighting for the people on the bottom of the hierarchy you firstly put yourself in opposition to rightoids, and then, through set theory, in league with leftoids. The two biggest writers on inequality and poverty in the 19th century were Marx and a fucking pope. The Anglican church asked for money from the government when slavery was abolished and its plantations were suddenly useless. That's why there's a leftcath movement but basically no leftprotestant equivalent, wake up sheeple, etc etc. Finally, Wong(Pargin)'s articles skewed slightly libertarian, with their strong pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, make-yourself-a-really-useful-engine vibe, and that simply couldn't run in the second Obama term, aka The Time When Pissy Internet Politics Shit Got Real. And so Cracked hired a new writer that came at things with a different, more leftie slant.
No one liked J.F. Sargent (comments here, or here, for example). I distinctly remember in the comments (which was quite possibly the best - or at least least-bad - comment section I've seen on the internet as long as you sorted by votes) that Sargent was routinely pilloried, not really for the content, but for the style in which he wrote things. Sargent was an interminably smug kind of liberal. Like Bill Maher without the Muslim-bashing or Trevor Noah without the weird voice or background in making actually funny jokes before he was put on the Daily Show. Those guys are not the kind of person you want on the front lines trying to change people's minds. They're the kind of preacher that can ONLY preach to the converted, to the truly devoted, because the things they say requires too much prior knowledge to be comprehensible to a convert/noob. There's J.F.Sargent running hismouth keyboard about the social-justice equivalent of Ezekiel 16, meanwhile if you're anything like me you just had to check whether Ezekiel was even a real bible book. Cracked's audience were not receptive to this nonsense, and this, in my opinion, was the reason for their downfall, more than how they were run, more than the quality of their videos, more even than the simple passage of time. They fucked it hard because they didn't know their audience. Sargent wasn't even wrong a lot of the time, just tactless. Here's one where the (top-voted, at least, I'm not touching the cesspit) audience is in fact receptive because he was significantly less smug and more considerate about how to frame things. And it wasn't just Sargent: Adam Tod Brown, who people already hated, suddenly went on a tirade about how Australia should be called Racist Island, and even though that's kind of true the combination of his status as official Least Favourite Cracked Columnist combined with the fractious relationship between the audience and the writers set off a big shitstorm. It doesn't help that Wong(Pargin) hated the commenters too, so any dissent from them was seen as a net positive from him, someone who I imagine was never completely on board with these kinds of political statements but was on board with owning the fans.
Who were these fans, their audience? Apolitical types. I think a lot of people online believe it is impossible to be apolitical - you saw my rant up there - but for the vast majority of people these things don't affect their lives in the way that you'd think. I'm not talking about the people who pride themselves on being above politics, they're wankers and you can say what you want to them. I'm talking about people who just haven't thought seriously about their class position or political stance or whatever, because they've been busy doing other things like having friends and going outside.
I had an illuminating conversation with someone that did not care about politics this summer. She asked my major and was disappointed when I said politics. Luckily I fucking hate my degree and as soon as it's over I'm going to run off to Montréal and become a poet, otherwise I would've been offended. She said in one of her classes at school (not even a politics one) someone had been bullied out of class for outing themselves as a Tory, and I nodded concernedly like I absolutely wouldn't do that (I would, I'm a cunt, but I tend not to tell people I'm a cunt until the third time we've met or so) and as an unattached, first time voter, she'd found the whole thing very offputting, and I completely empathise. The way we talk about politics is, in my opinion necessarily, vitriolic, because we are fighting for our lives essentially, but that's not going to be very ingratiating to someone who hasn't picked a side yet. I am definitely not calling for a return to civility politics or asking you to refrain from calling Boris Johnson 'the antithesis of everything that is good in the world, a disgrace to the upper classes of his country, for they produced this faux-Machiavellian talent-vacuum blob of excrement, to the lower classes, for they allowed him to seize power of this country in the name of a pointless political project, and to the concept of biology for allowing him to breathe' because all those things are true. I'm just saying maybe don't lead with that at the 'Welcome to Politics' meeting. Maybe don't publish numerous articles on a nerd website primarily (though not entirely, shout out girls who read Cracked, 'tis an awesome thing to see!) for men that chastise nerds and men as all that is wrong with the world, as Cracked thought would be a good idea. If you are going to do that, then please do not be surprised when they stop reading your bollocks in their droves, and definitely do not take that refusal to grovel as a sign that men ARE in fact trash; we may be trash, but outside of the snivelling John Lennons in our ranks, we tend not to respond well to routine punishment and belittlement (unless you are a qt goth domme in which case hmu and call me a dirty Tory xx).
And there we have it. The people that read Cracked religiously were people who clung desperately to their nerd identities like limpets to sandstone, who took a sort of relief in having a space on the internet in which they could nerd out free from our judging normie eyes. They weren't particularly concerned with politicians unless it threatened their vidya, and honestly I much prefer the PennyArcade apathetic gamer to whatever the fuck gamers are now. You can't get people to change their identites through ridicule, it's a narcissistic injury, remember? I am understanding of the idea of "I'm TIRED of censoring myself for le cis white male etc," but if that's the case then stop being the mouthpiece. It doesn't HAVE to be you, you know? If you're tired of trying to convert people find a new thing to do that isn't converting people, don't just do it badly. You might be able to get them to change a few views if they're otherwise on the same side as you, but to lead with "here's why you've been awful your whole life and your choice of identity is fucking TRASH," is to produce a fanatic member of the Whichever-Side-Isn't-You-And-Your-Lot Party. Cracked didn't clock that, the people behind GamerGate didn't clock that (and that's all I'm saying on that in light of recent events), and people continue to still not clock that in the year of our lord two thousand and nineteen. Hopefully in future it won't cost people their jobs, or worse.
There's a lot to unpack here. Let's get to work.
Reason #1 - Business Idiocy
The conventional wisdom behind the fall of Cracked is the fact than in late 2017, their parent company, E.W. Scripps, fired everybody talented. This happened to come down very heavily on the side of the video production team that produced things like After Hours and Some News. On the face of it, this seems like a pretty succinct explanation. Firstly, we know how dumb companies can be, so "they fired their whole staff" doesn't even sound like much of a stretch. Secondly, to be more charitable, there was a big realisation at the end of 2018 that the fabled "pivot to video" was bollocks.I was recently laid off but at least there isn't a fire moving towards my home here in Westwood. Now to take a sip of water, go outside and— Daniel O'Brien (@DOB_INC) December 6, 2017
If you're not familiar, the pivot to video was something that came about in around 2015 where companies realised that video advertising was harder to ignore than textual advertising, and therefore made all their content video. This is why every site you go to, from BuzzFeed to the NYT, has those fucking dead autoplaying videos when you're just trying to read things. The official line on this is that "you digital natives just prefer consuming content this way," but I've never met anyone that likes them. Anyway, it turns out that the pivot to video was bollocks because 1) NO ONE LIKES THESE, and 2) it was all based on facebook lying, which I know seems ridiculous but is sadly true. Companies who'd fired their entire editorial staff in the name of producing more audiovisual content had to then fire their entire AV division, or at least admit it wasn't doing what was expected financially.
it’s crazy to me that anything ever pivoted to video bc who the fuck has time to watch a video— speedy ortiz haunted presence? (@sad13) August 30, 2019
So Cracked lost money because of the pivot to video and that's why they fired their video team and that's why the website is dead now, right? No. Michael Swaim, former regular contributor and absolute legend, lays down the law in a YouTube comment on a video lamenting the loss of Cracked.
The OVERWHELMINGLY PRIMARY factor in the layoffs and decision to run Cracked as a "ghost ship" while it winds down was made by Scripps. ...they intentionally purchased a company on its down-slope so that they wouldn't be sued for wrongful terminations when they laid everyone off and took the huge financial loss. Why would a giant media company want to buy into a financial loss? Because, it is currently legal in the US to purchase a company, liquidate it at a loss, lay everyone off, credit the loss against the earnings of your hundred other media companies come tax season, and then pocket the money made by running a ghost ship company with no employees and presumably use it to counter other losses or pad the pockets of your board or investors. That's what happened. They didn't care about comedy, or content, or our politics, they're just a dying newspaper conglomerate who used us a loophole to cushion their own quarterly losses. Thought you'd want to know! People from without can cite other factors about why we were on the down-slope in the first place, and I'm not here to defend or deny any of those, but that was the direct reason for the layoffs and current state of the site. Scripps didn't bite off more than they can chew; they decided to liquidate us.
Again, I'm too stupid to fully understand what's going on or why it worked, but this strategy reminds me of how I had the Great Financial Crisis of ought-8 explained to me. Essentially, banks across the world gave mortgages to people who could 100% not pay them back, grouped these mortgages into delicious packages that were doomed to implode, and then went to finance insurers like AIG and said "oi i bet u this package will implode lol pls insure me against that" and then pocketed the insurance money when the mortgages went unpaid. Scripps were running a slightly different game, though; they stripped Cracked for parts, added the losses to their accounts at the end of the year so they'd be taxed less, and then pocketed the cash. They're not the inept digital immigrants that posts like this would have you believe, they clearly knew what they were doing. Like I've said before, companies aren't stupid - anything I can work out they can definitely work out. "But you just said companies ARE dum-" I say a lot of things, honey, don't deep it. Nuance and compassion are important, and I love them, but they're not entertaining or fun, so when I post, sometimes I will go all in on shit I don't necessarily 100% believe and be a lot meaner than I otherwise would be. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, my shitposts are large and meandering, they contain multitudes."
Reason #2 - The natural life cycle of talent
Look at what Michael said again. Then check the Google Trends graph. 2017 is not when Cracked died. It was already "on the down-slope" when Scripps bought them; that's what allowed them to write shit off in the first place. So it's not bad management that killed them, nor is it purposely malevolent management. We need to go back, and we need to go deeper.Nothing good lasts forever, right? Buddha's been trying to tell us that for ages. The best we can hope for is a brief moment where the stars align just right and a murderer's row of talent happens to coalesce somewhere. You know the kinds of stories. The Beatles before they made that ghastly Sgt. Pepper album, the Leicester City team that accidentally won the league, and so on. There are countless examples of groups coming together to do amazing work, and crucially, falling apart afterwards for whatever reason. John gets super into acid and Yoko, Kanté gets bought by Chelsea, and for our purposes, Soren Bowie gets poached by American Dad!.
Obviously the talent levels aren't quite the same (for the record it's Kanté > Soren >>> John "Woman Is The Nigger Of The World, Think About It" Lennon) but when Cracked was at its best it was home to a lot of very funny people. Soren, Dan O'Brien, Seanbaby, Michael Swaim, etc etc. were all frequent contributors to the site, whether through video or written content, and for a while there, they were incredibly popular - Wikipedia suggests that in 2010 Cracked drew over a billion pageviews.
Okay can we talk about this John Lennon clip for a second? Only someone as retarded as he could possibly think it was a good idea. First of all, I refuse to take lectures on the position of women in society from someone who beat his first wife, and then, AFTER THIS SONG, I.E. AFTER HIS "CHANGE OF HEART," left his wife to get fucked up with Harry Nilsson for a couple of years. Secondly, I'm not offended by him saying the n-word, I'm just confused that his line of argument was to attack people for being "white males" that didn't understand the good he was doing. You don't convert people by attacking their identities, it just entrenches them harder. This time last year a girl told me I was too smart to spend my time watching football, playing guitar and drinking, and so I doubled down on those things so hard I got a third this year. It simply doesn't work, it's a narcissistic injury that makes your brain want to maintain the status quo even more than usual. Also note the way he fucking bombs out, like he was expecting gasps, or even begrudging applause, "You've figured me out, o wonderful John!", but instead everyone is thoroughly bored. "Will you menaces to society just go and play your number?" deadpans the host, encapsulating what we're all thinking. John Lennon was the 1970s equivalent of "we live in a society"-posting and anyone who rates him as anything other than a good songwriter and occasional bellend is not to be trusted. Anyway.
"So you WERE saying once those writers left Cracked stopped being good?" I thought so, but it turns out the exodus isn't the catalyst either. Writers like Adam Tod Brown only left in 2016, Soren and Michael in 2017, and Seanbaby and David Wong are still there. We're clearly not dealing with a Leicester City here, that decline kicks off in 2012 and they didn't lose anyone until much later on. So what's going on here?
Reason #3 - I Grew Up???
I realise that so far, I've been telling and not showing. "Cracked is bad now, but used to be good!" I howl, expecting you to agree for some reason. I was on Cracked when I was like 14 and I'm wary of revisiting it. I was at a friend's a few months ago and we ended up watching a lot of shows from our childhood, and I remembered one programme (Sorry I've Got No Head if you're woke w/r/t CBBC) as being hilarious. The disappointment when sketch after sketch limped by as I screamed "No I PROMISE IT GETS GOOD AFTER THE SEVENTEENTH SKETCH YOU HAVE TO TRUST ME" was very painful and I'm not sure I want to do it again. |
| Obligatory. |
Reason #4 - The Great 2013-ish Cultural Shift
Something like atheism was a hot-button political topic that was bound to be affected by shifts in the way we thought about politics like the one following the financial crisis. You'd expect a humour website to emerge relatively unscathed, though. And yet.The thing about Cracked was it wasn't 100% humour. There was an occasional columnist called Robert Evans who would write up the personal experiences of people from all walks of life, often to suprisingly poignant effect, especially because we were expecting humour and got hit with something altogether more serious (with the odd joke injected in, of course). Columnist John Cheese wrote more and more about his hardscrabble, lower-class upbringing as time progressed. You can't read those articles though, cause it turns out he was a sex pest, as FUCKING per. De facto site leader David Wong (Jason Pargin) took a different tack - he was more of a self-help kinda harsh-truths writer, with the requisite amounts of circa 2012-internet-humour to sugar the pill. Funnily enough, he's the reason I know who the Last Psychiatrist is, since Wong mentioned him in this incredibly popular post that he updates a bit every year, and therefore Cracked is directly responsible for this clusterfuck of a blog. This is why I feel the need to eulogise the place, as well as its interesting place in internet history.
Speaking of, the development I want to point out is their drift away from bantz into radical liberal politics. You know, the kind of tumblr bluehair stuff that it's not even fun to roast anymore but I do it anyway. Robert Evans' articles contributed, because it made Cracked feel like it was an important journalistic website rather than the place you go when you want to read about the Top Ten Ways Iron Man 3 Makes NO Sense while you have a shit. John Cheese did the same, by establishing the site as pro-poors, rather than apolitical. "You can like poor people and still not necessarily be political!" No, honey, you can't, right-wing thought is predicated on hierarchy and the PRESERVATION of that hierarchy especially, if you start fighting for the people on the bottom of the hierarchy you firstly put yourself in opposition to rightoids, and then, through set theory, in league with leftoids. The two biggest writers on inequality and poverty in the 19th century were Marx and a fucking pope. The Anglican church asked for money from the government when slavery was abolished and its plantations were suddenly useless. That's why there's a leftcath movement but basically no leftprotestant equivalent, wake up sheeple, etc etc. Finally, Wong(Pargin)'s articles skewed slightly libertarian, with their strong pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, make-yourself-a-really-useful-engine vibe, and that simply couldn't run in the second Obama term, aka The Time When Pissy Internet Politics Shit Got Real. And so Cracked hired a new writer that came at things with a different, more leftie slant.
No one liked J.F. Sargent (comments here, or here, for example). I distinctly remember in the comments (which was quite possibly the best - or at least least-bad - comment section I've seen on the internet as long as you sorted by votes) that Sargent was routinely pilloried, not really for the content, but for the style in which he wrote things. Sargent was an interminably smug kind of liberal. Like Bill Maher without the Muslim-bashing or Trevor Noah without the weird voice or background in making actually funny jokes before he was put on the Daily Show. Those guys are not the kind of person you want on the front lines trying to change people's minds. They're the kind of preacher that can ONLY preach to the converted, to the truly devoted, because the things they say requires too much prior knowledge to be comprehensible to a convert/noob. There's J.F.Sargent running his
Who were these fans, their audience? Apolitical types. I think a lot of people online believe it is impossible to be apolitical - you saw my rant up there - but for the vast majority of people these things don't affect their lives in the way that you'd think. I'm not talking about the people who pride themselves on being above politics, they're wankers and you can say what you want to them. I'm talking about people who just haven't thought seriously about their class position or political stance or whatever, because they've been busy doing other things like having friends and going outside.
Politics is fucking embarrassing and everyone who cares about it is unfathomably stupid https://t.co/YsuoVm2CS2— sidley park fan account (@volvicstorm98) August 18, 2019
I had an illuminating conversation with someone that did not care about politics this summer. She asked my major and was disappointed when I said politics. Luckily I fucking hate my degree and as soon as it's over I'm going to run off to Montréal and become a poet, otherwise I would've been offended. She said in one of her classes at school (not even a politics one) someone had been bullied out of class for outing themselves as a Tory, and I nodded concernedly like I absolutely wouldn't do that (I would, I'm a cunt, but I tend not to tell people I'm a cunt until the third time we've met or so) and as an unattached, first time voter, she'd found the whole thing very offputting, and I completely empathise. The way we talk about politics is, in my opinion necessarily, vitriolic, because we are fighting for our lives essentially, but that's not going to be very ingratiating to someone who hasn't picked a side yet. I am definitely not calling for a return to civility politics or asking you to refrain from calling Boris Johnson 'the antithesis of everything that is good in the world, a disgrace to the upper classes of his country, for they produced this faux-Machiavellian talent-vacuum blob of excrement, to the lower classes, for they allowed him to seize power of this country in the name of a pointless political project, and to the concept of biology for allowing him to breathe' because all those things are true. I'm just saying maybe don't lead with that at the 'Welcome to Politics' meeting. Maybe don't publish numerous articles on a nerd website primarily (though not entirely, shout out girls who read Cracked, 'tis an awesome thing to see!) for men that chastise nerds and men as all that is wrong with the world, as Cracked thought would be a good idea. If you are going to do that, then please do not be surprised when they stop reading your bollocks in their droves, and definitely do not take that refusal to grovel as a sign that men ARE in fact trash; we may be trash, but outside of the snivelling John Lennons in our ranks, we tend not to respond well to routine punishment and belittlement (unless you are a qt goth domme in which case hmu and call me a dirty Tory xx).
And there we have it. The people that read Cracked religiously were people who clung desperately to their nerd identities like limpets to sandstone, who took a sort of relief in having a space on the internet in which they could nerd out free from our judging normie eyes. They weren't particularly concerned with politicians unless it threatened their vidya, and honestly I much prefer the PennyArcade apathetic gamer to whatever the fuck gamers are now. You can't get people to change their identites through ridicule, it's a narcissistic injury, remember? I am understanding of the idea of "I'm TIRED of censoring myself for le cis white male etc," but if that's the case then stop being the mouthpiece. It doesn't HAVE to be you, you know? If you're tired of trying to convert people find a new thing to do that isn't converting people, don't just do it badly. You might be able to get them to change a few views if they're otherwise on the same side as you, but to lead with "here's why you've been awful your whole life and your choice of identity is fucking TRASH," is to produce a fanatic member of the Whichever-Side-Isn't-You-And-Your-Lot Party. Cracked didn't clock that, the people behind GamerGate didn't clock that (and that's all I'm saying on that in light of recent events), and people continue to still not clock that in the year of our lord two thousand and nineteen. Hopefully in future it won't cost people their jobs, or worse.
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